Talk:Robot Wars: Series 8/Heat 5
Judges' intervention Right. Part of me thinks this should be a forum post, but I'll do it here because I've listed them both as judges decisions on my sandbox and I'd like to make sure a discussion of it is in the mainspace. Let's talk about those head-to-head judges decisions (Gabriel v Beast, Ironside 3 v Pulsar). I must say I found them highly questionable. Giving the judges the power to award a knockout decision goes against everything the 3 and 2 point system stands for. Someone calls cease, if they don't you don't get to retroactively call cease just because the knockout you were hoping for didn't happen. Awarding a victory via judges doesn't make it not a victory, it just makes it a 2 point victory, but the judges seemed to think that they had to make it a knockout. The only practical difference of that is that a robot gets to move higher up the leaderboard than the other. I must say how sorry I feel for Team Mouse, who were pretty much screwed over by both decisions, as they allowed Gabriel and Pulsar to score 6 points instead of the 5 that they should have gotten by winning via judges. Had even one of those robots been given the 5 points they should have given, Ironside 3 would have been in the final. It probably would have lost to Pulsar again, but the robot who dominated so many of the battles in Heat E, to go out the way they did seemed horrendously unfair. These judges decisions that are actually knockouts smell really bad to me. I must say, I'm not a big fan. Accusations of favouratism come from things like this. Am I the only one who thought this? Toon Ganondorf (t ' 11:59, August 22, 2016 (UTC) :In my opinion, I actually thought the Ironside 3 vs Pulsar decision ''was fair. Not only was Ironside 3 more than likely going to stay upside down for more than ten seconds (which I'm pretty sure actually did happen in the full three minutes), Sir Killalot had no right to suddenly help Ironside 3 like that. Maybe they overruled the decision because a house robot unruly decided to change the outcome (Sir Chromalot vs Shell Shock is a great example of this). :As for the Gabriel vs Beast battle, that is a bit more controversial. Although I felt Beast had moved quite freely around the arena for the most part, the two teams at one point were working together to restart the machine, using Gabriel's weapon. On first impressions, it looked as if they had failed as they ran out of time, but I could be wrong here. :I would also like to discuss the Gabriel vs Pulsar final; I have to say, Pulsar came dangerously close to being counted out on several occasions. It made for an very interesting heat final, to the point where I felt Pulsar was going to lose the decision due to the occasional stoppages. It turns out that it didn't, so I am happy with the result. Hopefully Gabriel or Thor stands a chance at winning the wildcard. SpaceManiac888 (talk) 12:26, August 22, 2016 (UTC) ::What a choice of two fights I got to be in the audience for, eh? I must disagree with you on Gabriel vs Beast, that was clearly a knockout. In fact Beast was barely working when they entered the arena. Yes being immobile on one side doesn't seem to count as an official KO in this series, but the Judges couldn't have awarded PP3D 3 points in the same situation because it was also immobile itself. Having watched the full three minutes of this fight, I can't remember if there was a specific moment where Beast was completely immobile for 10 seconds, but collectively throughout the fight they were stationary for well over that time. Immobile on one side is good enough for me, that was a KO. Pulsar vs Ironside 3 is tricky, but at the time I'd just seen Eruption vs Apollo, where Apollo was rendered immobile after literally ten seconds of immobility despite coming back to life afterwards, so I kinda saw it coming, and agreed with the decision. Now knowing that Storm2 was immobile for twenty seconds against Eruption taints my view somewhat, but only one of those two battles could have been incorrect, and I'm more inclined to say it was the Eruption vs Storm fight that was wrong. The 3 points being awarded to Pulsar is an uncertainty, there were murmurs of both numbers of points at filming, and ultimately it didn't matter because even if Pulsar earned two points, it would have gone through over Ironside 3 anyway. [[User:ToastUltimatum|'''Toast]][[User talk:ToastUltimatum|'Ultimatum']] 12:29, August 22, 2016 (UTC) :To me, Beast and Ironside 3 should have both been deemed immobile and shouldn't have gone to the Judges in the first place. Beast wasn't moving against Gabriel and should have been counted out, while Ironside 3's self-righting mechanism failed to work properly, and Killalot should not have turned it back over. Looking back at earlier battles in the series, we didn't see Terrorhurtz get righted again after being flipped over and we didn't see Sabretooth being righted in their round 1 battle either. All this inconsistency has made me realise how much Robot Wars needs Refbot back for the next series. [[User:The R A Z 3R|'R'a'z'3'r']](talk) 12:35, August 22, 2016 (UTC) :::interesting blend of opinions here. I don't think either decision was controversial, and I agree both should have been counted out. However I don't agree with retrospectively changing a judges call to a knockout, especially when the points are so close. Gabriel was stuck on the flame pit, but Ironside 3 only got 2 points for that because the judges handed down the obvious outcome. One wonders if Ironside 3 hadn't fallen into the pit after Pulsar, if the judges could have justified saying that the pitted robot had immobilised the robot who just pushed it in. Im of the opinion that 10 seconds is far too little countdown time. There wouldn't be disputed about Pulsar at 30 seconds. 'Toon Ganondorf (t ' 12:40, August 22, 2016 (UTC)